The thing about conspiracy theories and perhaps most ideologies is that, while the broad outline is inarguable, the actual specific details tend to vary from person to person. ‘Flat earth’, for instance, can be anything from ‘the earth is flat and this is being concealed from us’ to ‘the earth is flat so that, when the rapture comes, God can put all the sinners on one side and throw them off the planet’. The commonly accepted tenets among believers are thus nearly impossible to meaningfully categorise.

And… In my time with GTA4 over the years, ever since it came out, I’ve come to realise that the game posits the ‘American Dream’ itself as a conspiracy theory, with both the same general failings and the net negative effect it has on almost everyone.

Before I really get into this, I need to lay my cards on the table:

I fucking hate the GTA series. Ever since I was exposed to it (against my will, by a friend who thought it was the best shit ever made), I’ve seen it as nothing more than South Park for people who have panic attacks when they’re forced to think about something.
My opinion has only plummeted as time passes, with each replay of the PS2 games or GTAV crushing my already abyssal opinion even further into.
Not helping this is that the last ten years of GTA have simply been GTAV, whereas in 2013 the last ten years of GTA had been a whole bevy of entries and spinoffs. Granted, most of them were bad, but still. GTAV is my least favourite GTA, and perhaps one of my least favourite games of all time. Its supersaturation is exhausting.

But I’ve never applied any of this to GTA4, a game I view as not only the best GTA but perhaps one of the best stories/worlds ever realised in the medium.

A pretty significant part of why I give GTA4 a pass is down to the level of self-awareness it has. Previous (and future.) GTA protagonists had a tendency to come across as robotic, amoral psychopaths with no character consistency and a pretty significant disconnect between gameplay and narrative.
GTA4, meanwhile, portrays its characters as psychopaths on purpose. It’s the entire point; these people are assholes. It’s a welcome relief from GTA5, but I can’t really get into why this early in the review.

You may have heard, in the past, people decrying GTA 4 as the odd one out or even ‘the bad one’ and I feel it’s important to understand why.

This game opens with a broad, faceless Scottish man getting whipped while screaming ‘DADDY’S BACK YOU BITCHES’ several times. As opposed to immediately setting up a plot hook, a big bad or anything of the sort, GTA4 simply features Niko pulling into Liberty City, meeting his alcoholic brother and doing his best to make ends meet. It maintains this slow, grounded pace for the entire runtime up until the credits roll.

And… people didn’t like it! GTA fans specifically hated it. That ‘daddy’s back’ declaration in the intro was because the game took 4 years to come out. Which, in the 00s, was basically an eternity. They wanted another San Andreas - a content-rich, needlessly bloated long game headed by a poorly written psychopath - and instead they got what’s essentially The Sopranos in videogame form. This is primarily why GTAV is Like That and why GTA4 tends to be forgotten.

It’s hard to actually blame Rockstar for this swerve, though. Their intentions were pure: Assuming that GTA fans really loved the social satire and the madness of their protagonists, Rockstar developed a game where the critique of America is at the forefront and the narrative actually focuses on why the main character is like that.
Unfortunately for them, however, the humans behind GTA evidently changed their tune between San Andreas and GTA4 whether they were aware of it or not. At some point, America ceased to be funny to them and started being horrifying. It really, really, really shows.

GTA4 opens up with Niko’s arrival in Liberty City and almost immediately the game sets its tone. Roman - his cousin - arrives drunk off his ass in a shitty little car, the radio is playing Ukranian pop music and all around you is just… absolute fucking poverty. Roman’s taxi business is a cheap converted warehouse, people live under rail bridges, the nearby amusement park is completely abandoned and shit dude even the nearby park looks like ass.

What really strikes me, though, is that for all the talk of ‘a new life’ in America the game actually makes it clear that the first area is nothing of the sort.

In the story, it takes several hours for named characters with typical ‘American’ accents to actually appear. Till then, it’s primarily Serbians, Albanians, Jamaicans, Russians, Puerto Ricans and others scattered around. Outside of the story, the vast majority of pedestrians you encounter are ostensibly foreigners. As opposed to creating an alien atmosphere, Broker is rife with familiarity for Niko. So much so that his declaration of ‘I swore I wouldn’t kill anybody here’ rings hollow regardless of the player’s actions up until that point.

In this overly familiar world, Niko succumbs to fatalism and returns to bad habits like so many other characters you meet going forward. Fatalism runs through this game like a fault line, and a very early line sums it up perfectly;

“We can pick the game, but we cannot change the rules.”

GTA4’s cast is mostly people who’ve succumbed to this fatalism… Except Roman.

I often run into people who decry GTA4 as overtly cynical and pessimistic. It’s not difficult to see why, but I’d honestly argue that GTA4 is a relatively realistic-leaning-optimistic title and Roman exemplifies this tenfold. Despite having experienced the same horrific Yugoslav Wars in Serbia that his cousin did, Roman is a relatively optimistic man who takes the events of the game in stride despite the odd breakdown. He saw all the horrors, moved to America and actually accomplished the surprisingly difficult goal of establishing a business and owning a home.
Roman has a presence throughout the entire game, and serves as a fantastic foil to the relatively cynical Niko who constantly sees the worst in every situation. It’s telling that the ending in which he dies is almost universally considered to be the worst ending. I also hold a special fondness for his repeated calls to go bowling/play pool/etc. I didn’t realise it in my youth, but his and other friends’ calls serve as excellent stopgaps in a story that can kind of rush ahead at times.

Looping back to what I said at the start though, this game’s approach to the ‘American Dream’ is distinctly ahead of its time. It came out in 2007, when Call of Duty 4 had made imperialism mainstream again and American jingoism was still surging. This was a point in time where even games not set in the ‘modern day’ were rife with it - it’s omnipresent in Mass Effect, for instance, and still there in Gears of War. GTA4’s stance of ‘America fucking sucks’ isn’t revolutionary, but it is notable considering it’s peerage.

Unlike a lot of its themes, this one isn’t subtext. Early on ‘American greed’ is explicitly referred to as an infectious disease and it’s reiterated several times over. One of Niko’s first and most defining lines is “Capitalism is a dirty business”, which is pretty impressive given how ‘capitalism’ has become a no-no word in AAA gaming and its equivalents in other mediums. Can’t bite the hand that feeds, after all.

As for the American Dream itself, GTA4 treats it as a conspiracy theory. Several characters buy into it, most notably Roman, yet none of them can agree on a core definition. For the actual Americans, it mostly means some acquisition of status or wealth which is considered deserved due to their efforts. For the immigrants, it’s a mix between a fresh start and a relief from either past horrors or past crimes.

For Niko’s it’s all of the above.

He accomplishes none of these.

The last line spoken in GTA4 discounting phone calls is:

“So this is what the Dream feels like. This is the victory we longed for.”

There’s no definitive answer to what GTA4 thinks the Dream is, only that it’s considered abominable.

Moving on for a bit, what struck me the most during my replay is how well this game has aged. Barring some off-colour jokes about trans people and an oil baron being treated as a good person, there’s nothing particularly eyebrow raising or even just painfully dated. The humor is still funny, sharing much of its comedic DNA with something like Always Sunny, and despite the muddy models/texture I’d say Liberty City is still beautiful. A combination of great lighting and ambience only helps.

And the story, man the story… Easily one of the greatest crime fiction stories ever told.

At its core, GTA4 asks one really simple question: “What kind of person would you have to be in order to do the things most GTA protagonists did?”. Unlike its immediate successor, it doesn’t glorify any of these people. There are no attempts to make rapists likeable, antisemites/homophobes are universally awful people with no exceptions, and those obsessed with wealth are at best portrayed as sad souls flying too close to the sun. At worst they’re rightfully portrayed as selfish vain pricks who believe they’re owed the world.
As opposed to being about an event or what have you, GTA4 is an exploration of one man’s conscience and his experience with a world that’s paradoxically alien and familiar.

Well, not just his.

The friend system in GTA4 is much-maligned by more mainstream audiences, but even in 2008 I considered it an excellent system that only adds to the world and cast. As I said up above, they help pace the story especially from the midpoint onwards, and the dialogues Niko has with them tackle some subject matter that AAA games just completely shy away from even when they’re being ‘dark’.

Dwayne’s friendship chats dig deep into existentialism, suicidal despair, and other aspects of depression that are painfully salient in the 2020s amidst a growing loneliness epidemic. At one point, Dwayne muses that years of hardening himself to misery only left him unable to care, and that he’s struggling to remember how to care about anything outside of prison.

Packie meanwhile digs into the concept of being closeted, the pressures of toxic masculinity and how awareness of them doesn’t lessen them, and the double consciousness suffered by Irish-Americans who were born in America yet raised in an Irish Catholic upbringing. For a 2008 game, the treatment of queer people is surprisingly gentle and respectful and Packie’s self-questioning is approached with unexpected seriousness.

I realise now that it’s… very, very difficult to talk about GTA4’s story without spoiling it. Instead, I’ll just talk about the last act.

After hours of befriending people, working as a hitman/chauffeur and swapping out employers like they were a tarot deck, Niko is given two subsequent choices.

The first choice is, to be vague, a decision about whether or not to hold onto his previous identity, his life and trauma from Serbia. If you refuse, Niko and the rest of the cast state that it’s pretty unequivocally a good thing. If you accept… Well, TVTropes might suck but it rightfully lists GTA4 as the progenitor of ‘Vengeance Feels Empty’. Niko finds no catharsis in clinging to his old life, admits that he feels nothing, and while he’s not condemned by anyone it’s pretty clear that they don’t approve. Most tellingly, though; regardless of choice, Niko turns off the radio. Such a small thing, but it’s an impactful use of removing player control.
That said, refusing is very clearly the choice the developers want you to pick.

The second choice is essentially Niko being asked how he feels about his life in America. He can either chase the Dream, at which point NPCs mock him for being so stupid, or he can protect the people he cares about. Again, this choice is clearly weighted in favour of the latter (as the former costs you a vital gameplay feature), but what strikes me is how bitter the ending of the former is.
Niko greets the antagonist with ‘Welcome to America’ before putting an end to him. In essence, Niko gives himself over to the American Virus. It is fantastically grim, and only compounds how much the story nudges you to pick the latter choice.

But… I’ve done nothing but sing GTA4’s praises for the last 2000~ words. I unfortunately have to talk about the mission design.
When GTA4 came out, almost everything was decidedly ahead of its time. Other AAA games wouldn’t even try replicating the depth of its story for another five or so years, same with its open world simulation (which even GTAV took a step back from).

This does not apply to the mission design, which was archaic even at release. Missions are typically either shootouts, chases on foot, chases by car or tailing missions. These aren’t hard, in fact they’re quite easy. Unfortunately, the devs are aware of this and missions gradually become filled with either instant-fail conditions that can catch you off-guard because they’re not told to you until NPCs stop speaking, OR enemies simply become invulnerable until an event ends. Double unfortunately, the game also really likes to slam character building into the prelude of a mission, before the main event.

There’s no checkpoints.

None. Not until the DLCs.

A typical late game mission consists of a 5-10 minute drive with some impressively written and engaging character writing, followed by a shootout/chase/whatever you fail because of some poorly telegraphed condition or NPC with a rocket launcher spawning out of nowhere. You then have to do it all again. To the game’s credit, almost every mission seems to have two different sets of prelude conversations to pull from, so you’re rewarded - in a twisted way - for fucking up. Still, it gets grating towards the end as missions skyrocket in length and difficulty.

There’s also a small but grating matter; Rockstar didn’t renew the music license for the PC version and thus many stations are nearly gutted. This may not seem like much, but IMO the mid 2000s music and especially Vladivostok are crucial to the game’s atmosphere. The replacement music is not exactly up to snuff, and while it can easily be modded back to its original 2008 state it’s still quite the nuisance.

And… Man, if I don’t cut this review down it’ll go on forever. In the original draft, there were another 5k words after that music comment. Ruminations on how the game portrays immigrant solidarity, dissecting the ways in which the game carries a strong and tangible anti-capitalist message (ironic, Rockstar’s future considered), the surprising depth that comes with not portraying characters as white/black/hispanic/asian but as Irish/Slavic/Russian/American/Jamaican/African/Dominican/Spanish/etc etc, examining how the lack of customization and purchases is meant to reflect how Niko has nothing/how little money means to him and so many more little paragraphs.

But, honestly, not only is it a lot of filler (even by my rambling standards, see the Pathfinder review) but it is essentially nothing more than me dictating the entire game to you. While I would LOVE to write an actual thesis on GTA4, it’d take so much work that I’d have to be paid for it.

Ultimately, I’d say GTA4 has aged perfectly. It was amazing then, and it’s arguably even more amazing now. I considered it one of the finest games of all time when I first completed it as a youngling, and now that I’m an old fuck my opinion has only been reaffirmed.

Truly, when they put their minds into it, nobody does it like Rockstar.